Teach Me to Dance

Ukrainian-Canadian Ted Baryluk's grocery store has been a fixture in Winnipeg's north end for over twenty years. In this photo study, Ted talks about his store, the customers who have come and gone, and the social changes his multicultural neighbourhood has seen. But most of all he wonders what will become of his store after he retires. He hopes his daughter, Helen, will take over, but she wants to move away. The film is a wistful rendering of a shopkeeper's relationship with his daughter and a fascinating portrait of a neighbourhood and its inhabitants.

It had been a hard journey for immigrants Jan Laluckey and his family. But on arrival in Québec, the New World, all their hopes for a new and better life were dampened when immigration officials refused to allow Kasia, Jan's daughter, to remain. During a routine medical examination it was found that Kasia had contracted an infectious eye disease. In the end she was separated from her family and sent back to Europe alone.

From his colourful canvases, William Kurelek paints a vivid history of his father, who left the Ukraine after World War I to begin a life of farming in Canada. There are scenes of village life in the Ukraine, then the early days of struggle on an Alberta homestead, and the growing comfort, confidence and family. The narrator tells the story as Kurelek remembers it and his paintings record it - harvest time, weddings, the move to Manitoba and scenes from prairie life in the '20s and '30s. The story concludes with the move down east where his father had planned to retire, but finding idleness irksome, he bought a small farm. Here in Ontario, Kurelek paints another landscape with the same pleasure he painted the old.